The ability to access individuals through small pagers has become a common business practice and is also widely used for personal reasons. As a result, a substantial industry has grown up which is directed to providing both pagers and a service for wireless communication to individual pagers for communicating messages. As the industry has expanded, the areas of coverage have correspondingly expanded, and it is often necessary to effect inter-carrier communications when it is desired to page an individual who may be, at that time, far removed from the direct wireless range of all the transmitters in the network of a carrier local to the page request.
Thus, two industry trends may be particularly noted. First, carriers are forming contractual relationships such that each carrier can use the other party's or parties' existing networks rather than build out duplicate infrastructure. Second, as with any dynamic industry, consolidation is taking place. In both cases, a need arises to efficiently and seamlessly interface diverse networks which have separately evolved. This is notoriously difficult to achieve, notwithstanding that identical protocols may be in use in networks to be interfaced, because the independent evolutions may, and often do, result, for example, in the existence of identical designations, which may even have different meanings. Merely by way of example, it is not unusual, when interfacing two paging networks, to find that identical node addresses are used and that they may not even have the same meaning.
In the past, this problem has been rather rigidly addressed by identifying all the potential address conflicts and the like between two carriers and then "hard wiring" an interface to resolve the identified conflicts. (With modem technology, the term "hard wiring", in this context, can be achieved by suitably programming a processor to perform table look up functions.) However, this task must be performed again for each newly established interface between carriers.
Thus, it will be readily apparent to those skilled in the art that it would be highly desirable to provide a system which can effortlessly and seamlessly interface a plurality of paging networks in a highly flexible fashion which includes not only rationalizing the differences between paging networks to be interfaced, but also provides numerous "value added" features.